Surreptitiously, I study Silviu’s blond face, which must have been very handsome once upon a time, but now projects palpable depression and distrust, especially when he glances at his wife.
The last to arrive is Iris’s father, Mr. Dumitriu, a man in his sixties who lives on the floor above. He’s frowsy, unshaven and alcoholic-looking, with bitter blue eyes ringed by gray circles. He tells me frankly that he’s a bankrupt jeweler. With passable English, he tries to draw me into conversation about exactly what’s ruining the economy of Romania.
“The greed of certain people, Bruce, pull this country to its knees.”
“But aren’t there greedy people in every country, Mr. Dumitriu?”
“Ah, but here we are cursed with special problem.”
“What is that?”
“Why, the Jews, of course.”
“Hmm.” I take an overlarge gulp of whiskey.
“You are thinking,” he says, searching my face, “that I live in the past. That Jews are gone now. That this happened before war.”
“Look, Mr. Dumitriu, even before the war, it wasn’t the Jews that—”
He interrupts me. “You know, of course, there are only couple thousand of these robbers left in this country. So where did they go, while us rest are under the yoke of the Communists? They go to Israel, after cursing us with Communism, which they were instrumental to bringing. Then off they go merrily, leaving us in misery.”
Knowing that it’s futile, I’m drawn in anyway, and my voice has gotten shrill. “You know why there weren’t many Jews left here after the war, don’t you? And the others had to leave because the Communists persecuted them. Ceauşescu was actually in the business of selling Jews to Israel! But even if what you’re saying made any sense, which it doesn’t, it really doesn’t, well . . . they’re gone now.”
“Oh, in this you are wrong, my friend. These few Jews still hold all the powerful positions, and we are slaves to them, penniless.”
“I’m Jewish.”
“And I know.”
Iris intervenes. “Shut up, Papa. Leave the man alone.”
Mr. Dumitriu stands shakily and bows formally, irony distorting his smile. “Very nice to meet you, Mr. Bruce. That isn’t very Jewish name.” Then he walks out the door, leaving me to ponder uneasily who told him I was Jewish and why.
Mama calls from the kitchen. “Masa!”3 In the room where I’ll sleep, she and Elena have set up a large folding table, groaning with an enormous dinner of roast chicken, sarmale, tzatziki, a plate of scallions, roast potatoes, tomatoes and several bottles of red wine. Beamingly she ushers us to the table and forces me to sit at the head. A toast is raised in my honor before the pack begins to devour the succulent food. Iris elegantly raises a whole scallion to her lipsticked mouth, nibbling on the white head, hardly touching the robust plate before her. By this time, things are a blur. Everybody, including me, is drunk. They’ve decided that after dinner Bruce and the family must visit the local disco where Bogdan and his friend work as bouncers and where Romulus, I now understand, pimps. The table is hurriedly dismantled.
Elena appears, changed for the club, having gone all-out as a pointed defense tactic. She’s refreshed her lips with bright pink and added a thick new coat of foundation. Blue eye shadow and a false birthmark near her mouth complete the transformation. A cell phone is stuck in the waistband of her skintight gold Lurex slacks, and she’s wearing those platform shoes I concocted in my fantasies, probably based on shoes I’d seen on the prostitutes in Budapest. She snakes her body against Romulus, all the while throwing me a brash snarl.
Since it’s Tuesday night, the disco’s virtually empty, the dance floor occupied by Romulus, Elena, Floritchica and Romulus’s brother Vlad. House music rattles my drunken brain as I watch Elena shimmying backward, raising her blouse to reveal naked breasts, and Romulus gyrating with unzipped pants that have been lowered to show his pubic hair. Vlad is shirtless, undulating seductively at his mother, whose chubby arms are raised, her fingers snapping with jubilation, her jarring smile like a proud mother’s at a sporting event. For me, it’s a surreal scene, a cartoon evocation of my worst fantasies. Despite the nearly naked exhibition on the dance floor, all the smiles indicate that everyone finds the entertainment wholesome. Every other song, the DJ, a friend of Romulus’s, booms through the loudspeaker that the selection is dedicated to Bruce. I try to show my appreciation by grinning at the DJ booth and waving a stiff hand.
Back at Romulus’s apartment, I struggle to the bathroom and vomit, and when I notice that trails of the stuff have landed on my arms, I strip for a shower. But it’s ice cold. It turns out that the hot water in the block is turned off every night at eleven until the next morning. So I sponge off the mess with a cold washcloth and head for bed.
Moments after I switch off the light, I hear bare feet padding toward me. Hovering above me in the dark is the face of Elena, still as stony-looking but with its mouth fixed in a sympathetic smile.
“Bruce,” she says, “are you sad?”
“What do you care?’
Taken aback, she answers confusedly, “You mustn’t be sad, Bruce. You will find somebody.”
Whatever Romulus has told her, she obviously feels reassured enough to make this awkward gesture of largesse, so a vengeful recklessness takes over me. “Then why don’t you send Romulus’s brother Renei in here?”
The vulgar remark doesn’t have the shock effect I was expecting. Instead she answers, “We all know you like Romulus’s brother. But we cannot tell him that, we wouldn’t know how.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I mutter, and turn my humiliated face toward the wall.
XVIII
SLEEP DOESN’T COME. After an hour or so of spinning, the room is coated with fuzzy particles, like a low-resolution print. The hot night air is palpable, encasing me in a form of paralysis. A dull realization has surfaced, signaling the end of my fantasy life. With tonight’s revelations, the mechanism of my imagination has been shattered. All those narratives of sex and fear, fueled by lack of knowledge, have been deflated. There’s no more secret Romulus to explore, no treacherous family to fear, no more invented girlfriend to star in paranoid scenarios of betrayal. I’ve seen them all in flesh and blood. Crushing boredom, worse than the lacerating pain of passion, lowers against me; inspiration is over.
What strikes me more than my loss is the banality of reality, always unavoidable. It’s reduced my adventure to a humdrum story, no more interesting than the story of any other masochistic relationship. When I think about it, Romulus’s neglecting to mention there was a girl means little. He’d told me from the start there’d be girls in his life, and I’d agreed. But in order for my passion—that great machine of creation—to continue its fantasy production, she had to remain at a more remote level. Now not even the codeine I was taking can bring back the bright, fearful world that was fueled by my own self-deception.
Should I go back to New York? I’ve already drained that location of meaning. All trajectories promise only drops through ashen chutes to dust piles. I can’t think about movement of any kind.
Unable to sleep, I turn on the light and from my bag take the large monograph on the Romanian sculptor Brancusi that I’d brought with me to read. I thumb through the pages haphazardly, looking at the smooth ovoid shapes. His sculptures strike me as puzzles. There’s a stillness and passivity to them, just as on the faces of the peasants I saw; yet enigmatically, they hint of living, uninterrupted pulses deep inside. All of his figures—bodies, heads and birds—are purposely incomplete, cryptic synecdoches for entities and natural processes.
The streamlined pieces in reflective bronze or marble draw my eyes to them again and again, looking for signs of life. Their allure is too much like what I’ve been enduring: drawn over and over toward a beautiful blank form, which I suspected held some warm, embracing vitality deep within.
The most elliptically shaped remind me of something else, too. They produce the same effect as that ne
w trance that came over me in the countryside before Sibiu, similar to but even better than the opioids. What was it? A hypnotic fascination on seeing those light-shredding firs; the ancient, indifferent rock formations; but most of all, the sun-streaked meadows and peasants’ faces caught in conflict-free congress with Nature . . .
Brancusi himself, I learn, was one of these poor peasants, from the hamlet of Hobiţa in the region of Oltenia. At the age of seven, in the late nineteenth century, he climbed the hills of the Carpathians with shepherd staff in hand; and according to the author of this monograph, Ionel Jianou, he never lost his cosmic connection to natural processes, even when he moved to Paris, reached by a marathon hike almost all the way from Romania.
Like his sculptures, his biography reveals only a tantalizing surface. It has been shaped into an aesthetic gesture shrouded in mystery, which lets sensual elements peek out coyly. True, there’s a worldly, decadent period near the turn of the twentieth century, when he’s young, experimenting with café society and hashish and women and orgies with his friend, the relentlessly degenerate Modigliani; but a traumatic love affair with a very perverse heiress, an American—possibly Peggy Guggenheim—turns sour, setting him on a path of renunciation that leads to an interest in Eastern philosophy and primitive art.
Later in life, Milarepa’s Tibetan Book of the Dead becomes his Bible, and he becomes a virtual hermit, hidden in his studio in Montparnasse, executing the same forms over and over. Alienated from anything that seems contrived, he uses direct carving, like a peasant, instead of models, believing that each piece of stone or wood holds some spirit he must release.
His studio is a shrine in which the precise arrangement of sculptures takes on occult value. As he grows older, dressed in the all-white costume of the Romanian peasant, he makes an eccentric white-bearded figure on the streets of Paris.
White: for purity and mourning. With shepherd’s flute tucked into his waistband, he leads a white dog to cafés and movies and even glittering social events. In his studio, covered in white dust from his work with marble, he cooks the organs of animals in a clay oven he built himself, serves his white dog milk from a white washbasin and makes everything by hand; and he even sets his own leg in white plaster when he breaks it at an isolated country retreat.
Noguchi became his apprentice in 1927. Brancusi told him that the saw he used had to cut only with its own weight, regardless of how long it took, that the marks left by the axe blade had to remain as tangible signs of the contact between man and matter. All this contributes to Ionel Jianou’s theory that Brancusi succeeded in expressing the simple, spiritual yet cryptic world of the Romanian peasant—a pagan, mystical world, intimately linked to the earth, to matter.
The story chips away at my brain like a mason’s tool hollowing an aperture in a sealed room—especially when I study the many incarnations of The Kiss. Pictures and reproductions of this work have been so well distributed that it has the banal familiarity of a Mona Lisa. Earlier versions depict an embracing couple as a single block of stone, fused eternally in hermetic union. The bodies of the two lovers in The Kiss have melted together. I can hardly make out the woman’s boyish breast because it fits so well into the concave curve of the man’s chest. It’s as if the two were one androgynous object, a neutered union that has sacrificed some of its dynamic tension.
In all these sculptures, the lovers are eye to eye, fixated on each other; but they’re so close that they’re beyond the focus of their sight. They can’t see each other and don’t need to. In some, their eyes are even fused together, forming one obscene, bulging cleft circle, like a fertilized ovule, or even a female pubis and its slit.
Constantin Brancusi, The Kiss, 1916. PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART: THE LOUISE AND WALTER ARENSBERG COLLECTION, 1950. © 2006 ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK / ADAGP, PARIS.
Love is stone. Is that the message—that in deep love there’s no psychology, only unity, design?
Reading on about Brancusi’s life, I begin to see the sculptures as indicative of his bachelor state. The last half of his life was spent in nearly total isolation. The kiss may be a remembered one that represented a missed opportunity and led to forty years of artistic creation. Brancusi’s fantasies of union in stone seem pre-oedipal and infantile, attempts to reproduce the undifferentiated bliss of the child and the breast. Eyes, ears and noses have all but disappeared, buried in their closeness or perhaps not even yet born from the stone. The moment of the kiss is eternal, like suspension in the womb. So static has the moment become that it represents what we all must miss—security, pleasure. Even so, I can guess the truth: his life is a story of disillusionment with the Other and with love.
The book confuses me, and I put it down. The lack of psychological content in these forms, the elimination of a nose in some . . . the blankness of the eyes . . . seem to portray what I’m feeling, a loss of differentiation and identity . . . both damaged by the foolish expense of desire. In Brancusi, at least, the lovers are equal and eternal, and in fact, one of these sculptures was made as the headstone for a tomb. But what about me? My kiss is ephemeral, it would be embracing thin air.
There is, however, another feature: his spiritualization of matter. He may have failed in human love, but he found vitality and comfort in some hidden life force, which was rooted in Romania. According to the critic Jean Cassou, who wrote the introduction to this monograph in the 1960s, Romania “still maintains an essentially prehistoric appearance. It remains at the stage of the primitive herdsman, of gods and fables.” At such a stage, “the spirit retains its natural quality. It is an elemental spirit, a spirit of the mountains, rivers and forests, a rural consciousness, the verb of all creation.” Brancusi may have been irrevocably disappointed in love, but perhaps he was able to relocate desire on the cosmic plane.
I think I saw such union with matter in the faces of the peasants, but I didn’t realize then why it was so compelling. Even stranger, I could swear I’ve glimpsed it inside Romulus, a corrupted hustler. A kind of trance; something fatalistic referring to the myth of Mioriţa, the shepherd’s ecstatic union with death. It could be that all this obsessive behavior on my part has merely been an attempt to link myself to it.
If so, there’s no reason to put up any fight. What good would it do? I take another look at the soft irony of Romulus’s preposterous TV installation, with its symmetrical arrangement of Budweiser cans and empty gin bottles around the big, broken television. Then I head quietly for the bathroom, hearing on the way, as I near Romulus’s bedroom, a bed creaking, and moaning endearments in Romanian, which pass through me, not affecting my mood, as if they were the sound of wind rustling and the bleating of Mioriţa.
XIX
THE NEXT DAY, in the calm of shock, I stick to my resolve to find a hotel while we’re in Sibiu. Romulus takes me to the Împăratul Romanilor (Roman Emperor) Hotel, an eighteenth-century building that once hosted Brahms and Liszt. It’s on Nicolae Bălcescu Street near the beautiful Piaţa Mare, and it’s only thirty dollars a night. The lobby is so overcrowded with real and fake antiques that it looks like a shop. My room is Empire style, with a walnut bed and a woven spread in burgundy and ivory colors, which match the rug.
I head right for the marble-floored bathroom, but the water filling the tub is ice cold. It takes several calls to reception for the truth to come out. First I’m told to leave it running for a long time, then to wait an hour, but finally they admit that the boiler is out of order. So I endure an ice-cold sponge bath and fall into a doze on the firm mattress.
Warm and more sweet-tempered than I’ve ever seen him, Romulus, with chastened eyes, sits patiently by the bed, waiting for my nap to be over. He’s left a sulking Elena at home and wants to show me the city, of which he’s proud. But when I awake, in a mini-fit of ill temper, I tell him I plan to spend the day alone. Real disappointment floods his eyes, and in his face I catch another glimpse of that soft, pastoral fatalism I’m beginning to understand he’s hiding. Quickly it’s repl
aced by the usual cynical pallor as he dryly agrees to my request, asking only that I stop at his mother’s place with him first, since she’s counting on seeing me.
She lives on the ground floor of a much smaller building than Romulus’s. It’s the same two-room apartment that Romulus endured with his father and three brothers during adolescence and where his father sleeps in the kitchen by the gas stove, just as he did in the apartment in Vîlcea. There are a couple of lurid tapestries on the wall, a waterfall and a forest scene; and over a bookcase, a black-and-white first communion photo of Romulus at seven, looking oversensitive and optimistic. The room is shabby yet scrupulously neat, with even the couch pillows arranged in a geometric design.
But we’ve walked in on a disturbing scene. Renei, the youngest, is marching in circles around the small, freshly vacuumed room, mumbling to himself and swatting at the air. Floritchica, distraught and pale, is sitting on the couch and wringing her hands as she stares at him. When I ask what’s wrong, Romulus in English and Mama in French offer a disjointed explanation. It seems that Renei has been having mental attacks, characterized by racing thoughts, which come close to being aural hallucinations. His mind shouts at him; he can’t stop thinking or pacing, has bouts of agoraphobia or suddenly is struck mute, and the only way he can break these spells is by turning over a table or kicking a hole in the wall.
I can read the process in his eyes, which focus and unfocus repeatedly, showing an awareness of my presence by warm, friendly glances, then abruptly spacing out, after which the eyes turn blank and the pacing and tortured mumbling start again.
It’s a pathetic sight. The muscles in his young body twitch as if at the beginning of an epileptic attack, then relax again just as suddenly. There’s something luminous about his gingery skin and swimmingly anguished face that projects a heroic vulnerability. Because he’s so transparent, what he’s feeling flows toward me in unimpeded waves, engulfing me in its torment. Eventually he’s exhausted by the whole process, which I’m told has been going on all night, and I’m left wondering whether his condition has something to do with overstimulation from my visit. He struggles to the bed in the tiny kitchen, and when we check on him a few moments later is asleep.
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